Tuesday, February 12, 2008

CFP: "Argument Cultures," Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation," University of Windsor, June 3-6, 2009.

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers in informal logic or rhetorical or argumentation theory on topics related to the above theme, Argument Cultures. Abstracts prepared for blind refereeing must be submitted electronically no later than Sept. 8, 2008 to H. V. Hansen hhansen@uwindsor.ca. They should be between 200 and 250 words long. Please consult the Conference website for additional information on how to prepare proposals.
It is part of OSSA’s mandate to promote the work of graduate students and young scholars in the field, thus we strongly encourage submissions from this group. Please mention the degree and program at the time of submission. For the purposes of the 2009 conference, ‘graduate students’ are those who have not completed their graduate program by September 8, 2008. (The J. Anthony Blair Prize is awarded to the best student paper presented at the conference. The competition is open to all students who have their proposals accepted for the conference but Canadian graduate students who need financial assistance in order to attend should advise the Organizing Committee when they submit their proposals.

The Centre for Research on Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor will be offering a Summer Institute on Argumentation that will include the conference but begin a week earlier. The Institute will offer a course for graduate students as well as serve as an orientation to recent research in argumentation for post-doctoral students and junior faculty at universities and colleges. The course in the Institute will be taught by internationally recognized argumentation scholars.
Further announcements of the Summer Institute and its programmes will be made in April and September 2008. Further information is available on the institute's website: www.uwindsor.ca/crrar.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)